This is #9 of Tom Corson-Knowledge list of “15 Success Habits of Professional Authors and Writers.” I think I touched on this a bit in the previous post, but here I’ll go into more detail.

Write Every Day

Professional writers write every day. They write. It doesn’t matter if they write anything worth keeping that day, or if everything they wrote was crap. They must write every day.

Imagine a professional pianist who only practiced on the days that he felt like practicing. He wouldn’t be able to perform at a professional level for very long, and his career would be short-lived. The same can be said for a professional athlete. If he only practiced on the days he felt like practicing, he would soon find his skills suffering, and he could be benched for the rest of the season.

The athlete and the musician know that to be any good, they must practice very single day!

Artur Rubenstein practiced piano for at least three hours a day, every day! He was quoted once as saying that if he missed practice for one day, he noticed it. If he missed it two days in a row, his critiques noticed, and if he missed it three days in a row, his fans noticed. He is believed by many to have been the greatest pianist of the twentieth century, performing for eight decades!

Quantity Vs. Quality

There’s an age-old debate between quantity versus quality, and the silly thing is that you really need both. If you don’t write a quantity of stuff, you’ll never produce quality stuff. Write every day. Write a lot. Write whether you feel like it or not. Write when your hands hurt, your mind is numb or your life is falling apart. Just do it. Some days, the stuff you write won’t be worth as much as the paper you could print it on. But some days, you will write pearls. And the more you write, the more pearls you produce and the less garbage. With a quantity of writing, your quality improves.